October 17, 2014

Remember when Brazil was mad over the NSA scandal?

And how nobody wanted to do business with U.S. tech firms??

Yeah.......About that:

Google Funds New Brazil – U.S. Undersea Fiber Optic Cable

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/google-new-brazil-us-internet-cable

October 17, 2014

From the files of: "Shit Snowden/Greenwald won't ever tell you"

The Dark Market for Personal Data

BALTIMORE — THE reputation business is exploding. Having eroded privacy for decades, shady, poorly regulated data miners, brokers and resellers have now taken creepy classification to a whole new level. They have created lists of victims of sexual assault, and lists of people with sexually transmitted diseases. Lists of people who have Alzheimer’s, dementia and AIDS. Lists of the impotent and the depressed.

There are lists of “impulse buyers.” Lists of suckers: gullible consumers who have shown that they are susceptible to “vulnerability-based marketing.” And lists of those deemed commercially undesirable because they live in or near trailer parks or nursing homes. Not to mention lists of people who have been accused of wrongdoing, even if they were not charged or convicted.

Typically sold at a few cents per name, the lists don’t have to be particularly reliable to attract eager buyers — mostly marketers, but also, increasingly, financial institutions vetting customers to guard against fraud, and employers screening potential hires.

There are three problems with these lists. First, they are often inaccurate. For example, as The Washington Post reported, an Arkansas woman found her credit history and job prospects wrecked after she was mistakenly listed as a methamphetamine dealer. It took her years to clear her name and find a job.

Second, even when the information is accurate, many of the lists have no business being in the hands of retailers, bosses or banks. Having a medical condition, or having been a victim of a crime, is simply not relevant to most employment or credit decisions.

Third, people aren’t told they are on these lists, so they have no opportunity to correct bad information. The Arkansas woman found out about the inaccurate report only when she was denied a job. She was one of the rare ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/opinion/the-dark-market-for-personal-data.html?_r=0

October 16, 2014

Snowden Gets Job Offer From Russian Nationalist Party

Russia's LDPR party has invited U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden to host a television program on intelligence gathering, the TASS news agency reported Wednesday.

"We sent an invitation to Snowden, and we hope that his experience and knowledge will help our viewers learn all the ins and outs of intelligence gathering and cooperation between our intelligence agencies," Andrei Svintsov, a member of the party, was cited as saying.

The program will run on the nationalist party's television channel, LDPR-TV, which was launched on Jan. 1. The channel is broadcast on cable and satellite networks, and its programs can also be viewed on the station's official website.

Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who exposed details of U.S. government mass surveillance programs early last year, has received temporary asylum and a three-year residency permit in Russia.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/snowden-gets-job-offer-from-russian-nationalist-party/509510.html


And who are the far-right LDPR, you may ask?

The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia aims for "a revival of Russia as a great power." It has opposed both communism and the "wild" capitalism that resulted from Russia's reforms. It favours a mixed economy with private ownership but with a strong management role reserved for the state. In foreign policy, the party places a strong emphasis on "civilizations." It has supported the restoration of Russia with its "natural borders" (which the party believes include Belarus, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics). It sees the unification of Russia and Belarus as a first step in the restoration. The LDPR regards the United States and the Western civilization as the main external threat to Russia. The party has harshly criticised the discrimination against ethnic Russians in the Baltic states and demanded that they should be given Russian citizenship and protected against discriminatory legislation.[1]

Professor Henry E. Hale lists the party's main policy stands as nationalism and a focus in law and order. Although it often uses radical opposition rhetoric, the LDPR frequently votes for government proposals. This has led to speculation that the party receives funding from the Kremlin.[15]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDPR_(political_party)

October 16, 2014

Perry heads to Europe despite Ebola situation

Washington (CNN) -- Texas is still grappling with an Ebola scare, and Gov. Rick Perry -- faced with a test of his leadership ahead of a possible 2016 presidential bid -- is in Europe.

In the lead-up to an election that will determine his successor, the three-term Republican governor left this week for a pre-scheduled economic development trip that will include stops in England, Germany, Poland and Ukraine.

His trip comes after a Dallas nurse became the second person diagnosed with Ebola in the state, and as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monitors dozens more doctors and nurses who treated the first patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, who died last week.

Perry's absence has raised eyebrows: Texas Democrats pounced on Perry, saying the episode is characteristic of a governor they've long accused of being too focused on his own political fortunes.

Perry is "an irresponsible leader who's not paying attention to Texans," said Will Hailer, the Texas Democratic Party's executive director. He said departing for a trip just months before Perry's term ends and he departs the governor's office is "Aspiring Politics 101."

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/14/politics/perry-in-europe-during-ebola/index.html

Remember when the GOP was all over PBO's ass during his golf trip this summer?

October 14, 2014

Is The Guardian Holding Back The New York Times’ Snowden Stories?

A source at the Times tells The Daily Beast the paper feels ‘shackled’ over The Guardian’s total control over the cache of Edward Snowden NSA documents—and how they are used.

The Brits and the Yanks have long enjoyed a “special relationship,” and the bond between The Guardian and The New York Times is certainly special.

But when it comes to printing stories based on top-secret documents supplied by Edward Snowden, the relationship between the British and American media outlets occasionally seems frayed as well.

In the summer of 2013, as the British government moved to destroy The Guardian’s classified cache provided by the National Security Agency whistleblower who fled to Russia—going so far as to dispatch a wrecking crew to the paper’s London offices to shatter computer hard drives with drills and chisels—Guardian Editor in Chief Alan Rusbridger arranged for the tens of thousands of documents to be shared with and protected by the Times in New York, beyond the reach of British authorities.

The cooperative arrangement initially resulted in several eye-popping stories for both newspapers, including the Times’s Snowden-based exposé of how American and British intelligence operatives were data-mining the popular Angry Birds smartphone app to reveal all sorts of personal information about users.

But nine months later, according to Times newsroom employees who spoke on condition of anonymity, some reporters and editors at the U.S. newspaper are unhappy because of the agreement that Times editors struck with Rusbridger in 2013. It gives The Guardian total control over the Snowden cache, including how and when it can be used to develop, pursue, and publish investigations.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/14/is-the-guardian-holding-the-new-york-times-snowden-stories-back.html

More background: http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2014-06/02/michael-wolff-the-guardian

If this is true, then the NYT and other "partners" have been getting played like suckers...So much for that free-flow of information among "trusted journalists"...

October 13, 2014

Journalist killed for refusing to help ISIS

(oh, wait -- He was just an Iraqi journalist so understandably, nobody gave a shit )



Samarra (Iraq) (AFP) - Islamic State militants executed an Iraqi news cameraman and 12 other people on Friday in several towns and villages north of Baghdad, officials, relatives and witnesses said.

The jihadists shot dead Raad al-Azzawi, a 37-year-old cameraman for local news channel Sama Salaheddin, his brother and two other civilians in the village of Samra, east of the city of Tikrit, relatives of the journalist said.

"IS executed him, his brother and two other people in public today," one relative said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the jihadist organisation.

According to the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the father of three was detained by IS on September 7.

"They came to his home and took him and his brother," the relative said. "He did nothing wrong, his only crime was to be a cameraman, he was just doing his job."

"There must have been some people in the village who accused him of working for the government and tipped him off the jihadists... He always had his camera with him," he said.

According to an RSF statement issued last month, the Islamic State group had threatened to execute Azzawi on the grounds that he had refused to work for them.

http://news.yahoo.com/jihadists-execute-iraqi-journalist-3-others-relatives-200230879.html

October 13, 2014

Comer Cottrell, Who Got Rich on Hair Curling, Dies at 82

Comer Cottrell, who started with $600 and a borrowed typewriter and built a fortune making and selling hair-curling products to African-Americans, died on Oct. 3 at his home in Texas, where he had become the first black person to own part of a major-league baseball team. He was 82.

His family announced the death without specifying the cause.

Along with his brother, James, and another partner, Mr. Cottrell opened the Pro-Line Corporation in downtown Los Angeles in 1970. They rented a small warehouse, borrowed a typewriter from Comer Cottrell’s daughter, took $600 from savings and started mixing hair-care products by hand. They produced a few more successes than failures, but in 1980 Pro-Line struck gold. The partners came up with a way to replicate a hair style called the Jheri curl — named for Jheri Redding, who invented it — that involved softening the hair with one solution and curling it with another. At a time of Afro styles, the glossy, loosely curled Jheri caught on with celebrities like Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. Pro-Line’s product was intended to allow people to do their own Jheri curls at home instead of going to salons, which had been charging $200 to $300.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/business/comer-cottrell-pioneer-of-hair-products-for-blacks-dies-at-82.html?_r=0

October 12, 2014

Fake Snowden Is Russia's Newest TV Star

'Where the Motherland Begins' weirdly shows Snowden character as a mole in the U.S. since childhood.

The planned Oliver Stone film about National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden—played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt—and his quest for asylum in Russia, is still being shopped around to Hollywood studios and won’t start shooting for another three months. In the meantime, however, a thinly fictionalized version of the Snowden story just premiered on Russian television as part of an eight-episode spy drama, Where the Motherland Begins. And it has a peculiar twist, which implies that since he was a child, the former NSA contractor was, in a sense, groomed by a Russian intelligence agent.

Most of the miniseries—which aired from Sept. 29 to Oct. 3 on Channel One, Russia’s leading state-controlled channel—actually takes place in the mid-1980s and is a dramatization of that era’s U.S.-Soviet spy wars. But the story of “James Snow,” a fugitive former CIA/NSA contractor who disclosed classified information about U.S. surveillance of telephone and Internet communications worldwide, is the framing device that opens and concludes the main plot.

The miniseries begins in “Hong Kong, July 2013,” with a giant screen showing a news report on the whereabouts of Snow, rumored to be seeking asylum in Russia. Cut to Snow himself, watching the segment on a MacBook aboard a charter jet and looking like a somewhat hotter version of Snowden, right down to the trademark eyeglasses. At this point, there is a detour into a subtle-as-a-brick reference to current events: an expert on the news, introduced as “Oxbridge University” political scientist Jonathan Chadwick (and speaking what is meant to pass for British English), opines that the United States is likely to engineer some drastic distraction by way of damage control after Snow’s revelations. Such as, say… a war in Europe, most likely in a former Soviet republic bordering with the European Union? “I won’t be surprised if Washington attempts to play a tried-and-true card of the ‘Red Threat,’” intones Professor Chadwick while a worried Snow stares at the screen. “The Americans could pull their longtime geopolitical rival, Russia, into a major scandal such as a local military conflict, and then organize and lead a new crusade against Russia.” You don’t say.

This stunning analysis is interrupted by the arrival of a dumpy, unshaven older man in a gray suit—Snow’s curator from Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, who wants to chat. “Your mom’s name was Vera—Vera Finley, yes?” he says. Snow, played by Lithuanian-born Arnas Fedaravičius and actually sounding plausibly American, looks more startled than he should be. “I see you did your homework,” he replies. Mr. FSB also knows that Vera died in a car accident twenty years ago, when Snow was seven, and that Snow was raised by an uncle, Nick Storm, who turned up about a year later. Hasn’t he ever wondered where Uncle Nick had been until then? “I asked him about it once,” says Snow. “He said it wasn’t the time to talk about it.” Well, now’s the time, says his curator.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/12/fake-snowden-is-russia-s-newest-tv-star.html

October 12, 2014

Why the Trolls Will Always Win

This month is the 10-year anniversary of my first online threat. I thought it was a one-off, then. Just one angry guy. And it wasn’t really THAT bad. But looking back, it was the canary in the coal mine… the first hint that if I kept on this path, it would not end well. And what was that path? We’ll get to that in a minute.

Later I learned that the first threat had nothing to do with what I actually made or said in my books, blog posts, articles, and conference presentations. The real problem — as my first harasser described — was that others were beginning to pay attention to me. He wrote as if mere exposure to my work was harming his world.

But here’s the key: it turned out he wasn’t outraged about my work. His rage was because, in his mind, my work didn’t deserve the attention. Spoiler alert: “deserve” and “attention” are at the heart.

A year later, I wrote a light-hearted article about “haters” (the quotes matter) and something I called The Koolaid Point. It wasn’t about harassment, abuse, or threats against people but about the kind of brand “trolls” you find in, say, Apple discussion forums. My wildly non-scientific theory was this: the most vocal trolling and “hate” for a brand kicks in HARD once a critical mass of brand fans/users are thought to have “drunk the Koolaid”. In other words, the hate wasn’t so much about the product/brand but that other people were falling for it.

I was delighted, a few weeks’ later, to see my little “Koolaid Point” in Wired’s Jargon Watch column.

The me of 2005 had no idea what was coming.

Less than two years later, I’d learn that my festive take on harmless brand trolling also applied to people. And it wasn’t festive. Or harmless. Especially for women...

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/trolls-will-always-win/

I'm not trying to deflect your attention away from this incredibly wonderful essay, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the person in question is buddy-buddy with you guessed it, Glenn Greenwald (he certainly does keep some odd company, if I may be so bold...)

October 12, 2014

Erik Prince sighting (hold your noses)

Ex-Blackwater Chief Urges Hired Guns to Take on ISIS

The man who founded and ran Blackwater—the company that sent thousands of private workers into Afghanistan and Iraq—says President Barack Obama should hire a mercenary corps to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria.

“The American people are clearly war-fatigued,” writes Erik Prince, now the chairman of Frontier Services Group, a company that provides logistical support for much of Africa. “If the Administration cannot rally the political nerve or funding to send adequate active duty ground forces to answer the call, let the private sector finish the job.”

Some Americans might be willing to write private fighters a check (Prince himself has reportedly been linked to developing a mercenary force for the United Arab Emirates). But Blackwater—which earned more than $1 billion in Iraq—shows the dangers inherent with subcontracting out war. Its guards killed 17 civilians in Baghdad in 2007; a jury continues to deliberate the fate of four ex-employees implicated in the shooting.

One of its top officials in the Iraqi capital allegedly threatened to kill a State Department employee who had questions about its contracts with the U.S. government. And U.S. military officers routinely grumbled about the lack of “unity of command” that Blackwater’s presence in Iraq created. But that wouldn’t be a problem if there were no U.S. troops around.

Prince sold Blackwater Worldwide in 2010. The company changed its name to Xe a year before he sold it, and changed it again, to Academi, in 2011. In June, Academi merged with rival firm Triple Canopy to form Constellis Holdings, Inc. Constellis’ board includes John Ashcroft, attorney general under President George W. Bush, Bobby Ray Inman, a retired admiral and former director of the National Security Agency, and Jack Quinn, counselor to President Bill Clinton.

https://time.com/3490414/isis-isil-blackwater/

Lowlife fuckin' scumbag piece of shit...